Dr. Mike Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) and newly appointed to the Biden transition team’s Coronavirus Task Force, is a leading expert in infectious diseases. He spoke on Wednesday at Restaurant Finance Week, and cautioned that the news about a Pfizer vaccine's strong efficacy rate that's been in headlines this week was “misleading.”
Is it good news that Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine has a reported 90% efficacy rate? Sure. But the news was shared in a press release, not as a published study. We still have many more questions than we do answers.
Dr. Osterholm shared some key questions that we need to know before we’ll be jumping for joy - or planning vaccine distribution. Did it prevent symptoms, positive tests, or hospitalizations? How long does the protection provided by the vaccine last? How often are boosters needed? Did it produce antibodies? And how long did they last?
That doesn’t even get into the very real, practical concerns with distributing the vaccine itself. This particular vaccine is one of the three in phase three trials right now that requires extremely cold temperatures. The logistical challenge of delivering and administering vaccines at -93 degrees Fahrenheit is immensely high, and requires a huge amount of coordination on a national and global scale. Worldwide, we’d need 8 billion doses and the whole world to vaccinate for COVID to be truly controlled. Delivering super-cold vaccine using specialized transfer containers is a challenge in Atlanta or New York, but an entirely different and greater challenge in more remote areas worldwide.
As much as we hate to say it, we’re not in the clear yet, and we likely won’t be any time soon. Osterholm expects we won’t see “normal” in 2021 and it will take until 2023 to vaccinate the world - and until the world is vaccinated, no one country is “over” COVID.